During the past years we’ve seen a renewed interest from companies toward growth and investment, but with a rigorous focus on cost containment. As recent research points to high employee engagement as one of the top 3 factors of business success, it’s no surprise that companies started monitoring engagement levels and prefer redirecting budgets toward measurement, before starting to implement actions to improve engagement.
Gallup found that employee engagement drives business growth. Practically, this means that it is directly tied to business performance, in terms of predicting key performance outcomes. Take for example, business metrics such as: department productivity, safety costs & safety incidents, retention rates and absenteeism, customer loyalty and ultimately, turnover, that are impacted by levels of engagement – this raises the question:
Are you measuring employee engagement the right way?
“Measurement is one thing, but what you measure is another”, says Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist of employee engagement and well-being. Measuring employee engagement, the right way, is no easy feat, especially when you have so many tools on the market. They all theoretically measure employee engagement, but what should they focus on to support managers and businesses in creating real change?
Measurement is one thing,
but what you measure is another
Our first recommendation is to identify if the tool measures employees’ productivity or the work engagement component, which includes the emotional, cognitive, physical engagement of employees displayed during their work role performances. This means that if employee engagement broadly refers to the emotional commitment people have to the organization and its goals, how much they use their skills in the workplace, job security, etc., work engagement is more specifically geared around the work that they’re doing at the company, the effort invested into successfully completing their daily tasks, and the fulfillment gained due to that work.
To read the rest of the article, please go to Buyer Brain’s blog entry.
